The Art Institute of Portland Reviews

One of my favorite things about the school and this curriculum is the teachers. They're so excited about what they do and they're very knowledgeable. There are teachers who will sit back after class to speak with you until you're kicked out for school closing! All they want is for you to be successful, and to do that you must understand what you're doing, and the teachers are very good at what they do. The classes are very interesting in terms of what you learn and the projects you're given in order to learn them. However, since the course catalog has been switched around by administration, signing up for the classes you need is very difficult now.

As AI is an art institute, a lot of the classes required by my major don't work well online due to the nature of the studies. Which is fine, I'd much rather attend the class than study online. The school offers a lot of the non-major specific courses online like writing and some electives and all online courses are a condensed intensive study shortened to 6.5 weeks instead of the usual 11 week programs. I took my two required writing classes online this last term, but I decided I probably won't do it again. Although I enjoyed the accelerated aspect of the online courses (meaning more classes knocked out and sooner graduation for me), it was hard for me to keep up. This was probably more because my work schedule fell on days that I was required to turn in homework (which was every 3 or 4 days) so I would forget about it until the last minute or the next day a lot of times. The assignment dropbox, though fine for word documents normally, does not upload large files as efficiently as they could which would also frustrate me sometimes. There was hardly a professor/student relationship I felt, but that may have been more because of my lack of initiative. Overall I just found it wasn't my thing.

Classes can be scheduled around your personal schedule, but other times they can't. I asked for no night classes due to where I live and having to take public transportation (in a not very safe city once it's dark) and was signed up for all night classes. Instead of suggesting that I spread out my general and project based classes, my adviser originally told me to get all the general classes out of the way--leaving me with a final year and a half of all project based classes which will end up as an impossible work load.